Stan Musial

by George Vecsey

  One person Musial did not include in his memories of those trying days was the general manager of the Cardinals, Branch Rickey. However, as Musial became the best player ever to emerge from the Cardinals’ farm system, Rickey placed himself near the center of the process.

  Interviewed on camera nearly two decades later, Rickey gave his ornate version of the retooling of Stanley:

  He was signed as a batting practice pitcher for the Columbus, Ohio, club in the spring of 1941, training in Hollywood, Florida. It was the first time I was impressed with his ability as a hitter. Barney Shotton was the manager of the Columbus club. That morning when I came to visit him, he said, “Do you know a batsman named Musial?” And I said, “I never heard of him, but I do know a pitcher named Musial and he was sent here to pitch to your hitters.” And he said, “I want to show you where he hit the ball in this park out here,” and when we got out there that morning, he showed me where he hit the ball over the bank of the railroad in right center, and I asked him, “Did you see him hit it?” and he said, “I did,” and if he hadn’t seen it, he wouldn’t have believed it, and I said, “Well, I wouldn’t, if you don’t mind, I won’t either.”

  After that long shot, Musial at least had some hope of making it as a hitter as he traveled from coastal Hollywood deep inland, first to Albany, Georgia, and then to Columbus, Georgia, where the Cardinals’ lowest minor leaguers trained.

  However, as often happens in large organizations, Shotton’s observations about Musial’s hitting did not make their way to Columbus. Clay Hopper, the manager of Columbus, noticed Musial was listed as a pitcher and asked him to pitch against the Cardinals’ varsity as it headed north.

  “I told Clay, ‘I’m not a pitcher anymore,’ ” Musial said, but Hopper told him to pitch anyway. Terry Moore and Johnny Mize both hit home runs off him, and a few days later he pitched against the Phillies and was whacked again.

  As he despairingly waited for the next step, Musial spotted a familiar, weathered face—Ollie Vanek. In a not overly friendly world, here was somebody Musial knew, somebody who had once trekked to the Musial house to help persuade Lukasz Musial to sign the contract, somebody who might understand the desperation in a young man’s eyes.

  “Mr. Vanek, remember me?” Musial asked.

  Vanek, who had praised Musial as a hitter the year before while scouting in Daytona Beach, drew a momentary blank.

  “I place the face, kid, but not the name.”

  “Stan Musial … Stan Musial of Donora, Pennsylvania.”

  “Oh, sure, I remember,” Vanek said. “You’re the kid whose father needed so much persuasion to let you play.”

  The decency of both of them was very much in play. Musial was not polished enough to know how to work on the guilt or sympathy of managers or farm directors; he needed a deus ex machina, somebody to swoop out of the sky and rescue him.

  If the young man—still not twenty-one—had been a smart aleck or a whiner, the Shottons and Vaneks might have turned their backs on him. But people saw something decent in Musial as he virtually begged for a chance.

  WHO WAS Ollie Vanek? He had grown up around St. Louis, where his father worked for a foundry, and had attended St. Procopius College, now Benedictine, outside Chicago. After college, Ollie went into the Cardinal system, playing the outfield or third base or catching, which is how he had taken a foul tip off his right pinky in 1937, bending it permanently at a forty-five-degree angle.

  Years later, Vanek’s son, Ben, a dentist near Denver, would recall how the father would point “over there” as he told his sons to perform a household chore—and the Vanek boys would ask Dad to be more specific since his catcher’s fingers were pointing in various directions. That was catcher humor—what, you thought Joe Garagiola invented it?—typical for that miserable breed, whose handshake often resembles a sack of peanuts, bulging in odd shapes.

  In 1941 Vanek was slated to be a player-manager at Springfield, Missouri, with moderate leeway in choosing his players. At a staff meeting in Georgia, conducted by Rickey, managers at the A and B levels passed on Musial.

  Dib Williams, who had played for the 1930 and 1931 champion Philadelphia A’s, was a player-manager with the Cardinals’ Class C team in Decatur, Illinois, in 1941. Williams said he put in a bid for Musial but was rebuffed.

  “Mr. Rickey, in a fairly loud voice, told me he didn’t want to put the weakest outfield arm in the organization [Musial] in the largest professional ballpark [my ballpark] relaying throws to the weakest-throwing second baseman—ME!” However, the ballpark in Springfield, Missouri, had a short right-field fence, Williams said. In later years Musial and Vanek made it sound as if Vanek had been proactive in asking for the boy he had scouted.

  The more Musial hit in the major leagues, the more Branch Rickey would assert that he had his eye on the lad all along, while Vanek would insist Rickey had merely gone along with his request. Vanek could remember the boy crying as his father balked at signing the contract, and Vanek felt that a boy who wanted to play that badly …

  The relationship between Vanek and Rickey is complicated. In 1962, Rickey would resurface in St. Louis as the éminence grise of Gussie Busch, and would purge most of the front office staff, including the longtime scout Ollie Vanek. This cut Vanek’s income and pension, leading to bitterness toward Rickey.

  “The man was good for baseball,” Ben Vanek said years later, praising Rickey’s signing of Jackie Robinson and building farm systems.

  “He was also a man who liked to take credit for things when he was on the periphery,” Ben Vanek added. His father had put his own job on the line in 1941 by asking Rickey to let him take Musial.

  “You have to remember that now Musial is like Willie Mays, but back then he was just another face in the crowd,” Ben said.

  In Ollie Vanek’s obituary in 2000, Bob Broeg, the legendary Musial confidant, wrote: “Vanek spoke up. He liked Musial as an athlete. Ollie would take Stan.” So Musial’s career gained traction in Springfield, the Queen City of the Ozarks, in the southwest corner of the state, a hub of the Frisco and Missouri Pacific railroad.

  Springfield’s White City Park was located next door to the town sanitation disposal plant.

  “On a warm humid night they couldn’t draw any fans. The stench would just make you ill,” said John Hall, an authority on old-time Missouri baseball.

  In the fetid heat of the afternoon, Musial gravitated to the ballpark, where Vanek taught him to play the outfield. “He was the only ballplayer on the club who would come to me and ask me to put him through extra outfield practice,” Vanek said. One night Musial chased a line drive, running smack into the right-field fence. He was shaken up but stayed in the game.

  Minor-league fans understand that the best prospects do not stay long. You’ve gotta catch ’em fast, before they move on. Willie Mays played 81 games at Trenton in 1950 and 35 more at Minneapolis in 1951. Roberto Clemente, under wraps by the Brooklyn Dodgers at Montreal in 1954, was allowed to play 87 games, enough for Pittsburgh (Branch Rickey!) to figure out the ruse and claim him. Now Musial began his rush up the ladder.

  From that coiled stance, he began launching homers over the right-field fence, bouncing them off the houses across Boonville Avenue. The children of Springfield learned his name fast. Frank Hungerford, eleven years old, was allowed by his stepmother to take the bus to the ballpark. After the games, management let the children swarm onto the field to mingle with the home-team players.

  More than half a century later, after a career as an army colonel including hitches in Korea and Vietnam, Hungerford could remember getting close to the new star of the Springfield Cardinals.

  “I would pat him on the back. He was real friendly, very gracious,” Hungerford said.

  In his old age, Hungerford still had a newspaper clipping of his being given a Kiwanis Cardinals shirt by Musial, catcher Alvin Kluttz, and shortstop Dale Hackett. Another photo shows Stan and Lil Musial and their baby son, Dickie, surrounded by Kiwanis Leaguers
.

  Over the years there have been suggestions that Lil was running out of patience with her husband’s choice of careers, but Musial has praised his wife for keeping him going, saying with a smile, “She was the one that rubbed my arm.”

  Stan and Lil and Dickie shared an apartment with the family of John “Fats” Dantonio, a catcher from New Orleans and Musial’s best friend on the team. Years later, Lil would tell Tom Fox, a columnist in Philadelphia, how Dickie had come down with the whooping cough and Fats Dantonio caught it and the front office sent him home—without pay.

  Laughing over it years later, Lil also told Fox how she and Fats’s wife had gotten into an argument: “We were both cooking in the same kitchen and we almost came to blows over a slice of bread.”

  They were tense times. Nobody knew what was just ahead.

  ONE SOURCE of diversion in the Springfield clubhouse was a personable fifteen-year-old catcher Rickey had spirited out of St. Louis, to hide him from the scouts until he reached the legal signing age—a common Rickey tactic. The young catcher performed odd jobs in the clubhouse, like an apprentice in some ancient guild, and he also caught batting practice and played in the local Kiwanis League.

  Long before the kid, Joe Garagiola, became one of America’s favorite television personalities, Musial relied on him for comic relief. They had no way of knowing the friendship would shatter, many years later, in one of the darker episodes for both men. Back then it was all chatter and good times.

  Musial was tearing up the league. During one long bus ride to Topeka, Kansas, Vanek said, “You know what, Stan? I wouldn’t be surprised to see you in the majors in a couple of years.” Musial laughed politely.

  Back in Springfield, eleven-year-old Frank Hungerford read rumors in the papers that Rickey was coming down to inspect Musial. Apparently unaware of Rickey’s presence, Musial hit a homer and a single.

  Late in the game, as Vanek and Musial jogged to the outfield, Vanek said, “Goodbye, Stan.”

  The younger man was taken aback. “What do you mean, goodbye?” he asked.

  “Just goodbye. You’ll see,” Vanek said.

  The next morning Musial went fishing on the White River with Fats Dantonio and pitcher Blix Donnelly. The front office had a difficult time finding him to inform him he was being sent to Rochester.

  In later years, Rickey would assure everybody he had been keeping an eye on the prodigy, but Sam Breadon, the owner of the Cardinals, suggested otherwise.

  “I’ll let you in on a secret,” Breadon told the writer, Jack Sher, after the 1948 season. “Few know it, but when Stan Musial began hitting at Springfield, the Giants offered us $40,000 for him. And a certain party wanted to sell him. I couldn’t see the idea of selling Stan. I felt a hitter like that belonged on the Cards.” St. Louis fans, who feel that Musial was underrated in the East, can only shudder at the prospect of his being lionized for his hitting exploits in the oddly shaped Polo Grounds.

  Musial departed Springfield with a batting average of .379 in 87 games, 26 homers, and 94 RBIs. Before he left town, Musial stopped off to thank Vanek, twice.

  Stan and Lil took the train to Rochester. Lil remembered her pragmatic husband saying to her, “It looks now like all our baseball ambitions are coming true.” He probably meant the high minors. He had no idea.

  As luck would have it, Stanley had a friend in Rochester. Chuck Schmidt, the peppy assistant coach from Musial’s one year of high school ball in Donora, was now working in Rochester, and appeared at the train station when Musial arrived, carrying his clothes in a paper bag.

  Lil and Dick joined Stan in a rented apartment not far from the ballpark, and Chuck and Betty Jane Schmidt were a daily presence in their lives.

  Manager Tony Kaufman immediately put Musial into the lineup and discovered he was an apt pupil, with unusual hand-eye coordination. When Kaufman suggested Musial keep the third baseman honest by choking up on the bat and slashing a ground ball past him—Casey Stengel called it “the butcher boy”—Musial performed it perfectly twice. Kaufman asked if he had ever tried it, and Musial said, “Naw—it’s easy.” Kaufman, who had been at this game a while, knew it was not easy at all.

  Musial, who had missed Babe Ruth’s epic three-homer explosion in his final days with the Boston Braves in 1935, did get to see the Babe up close in Rochester six years later. Making a personal appearance, the Babe was sitting on the bench before a game, and Musial thought about going over to say hello—until he spotted the Babe taking a swig from a hip flask.

  Sticking to business, Musial hit .326 in 54 games for the Red Wings, who then played the Newark Bears in the International League playoffs. Meanwhile, the parent team was engaged in one of those old-fashioned all-or-nothing pennant races with the Dodgers—none of this modern wildcard business. Enos Slaughter, Johnny Mize, and Terry Moore were all injured, and Jimmy Ripple, the ranking left-handed hitter at Rochester, was out with a broken finger.

  With the rosters expanding on September 1, Rickey went to New Jersey to watch Musial hit against the top Yankee farmhands. The Red Wings were eliminated in six games and Musial, assuming his season was over, said goodbye to the Schmidts. “Well, guess I’ll be seeing you next year,” Musial told Schmidt before he headed home to Pittsburgh, taking the night train to save a few dollars.

  Lil met him in Pittsburgh and drove him down to Donora, where he attended Sunday Mass. Then he came home and lay down for a nap. In a few months he had gone from batting-practice fodder to promising slugger in the high minor leagues, and now he assumed his season, his breakthrough season, was over.

  13

  PENNANT RACE

  LIL INTERRUPTED his nap. He had just received a telegram ordering him to report to St. Louis because the Cardinals needed him for the final two weeks of the pennant race. The Labashes drove him up to Pittsburgh, where he missed the train, but he did arrive in St. Louis and signed a major-league contract for $400 a month. Even prorated for the couple of weeks he would be there, the contract gave him a nice little bonus to his $150-per-month salary in the minors.

  When Musial arrived at Sportsman’s Park, there was none of the bloggery and tweets that accompany every coming and going during a contemporary pennant race. No columns, no sidebar articles, no profiles on the kid who had hit .379 and .326 on his rapid rise up from the bushes. They were simpler times.

  Butch Yatkeman, the tiny sparrow of a clubhouse man, gave the kid uniform number 6, not because anybody thought Musial merited a single-digit number but because that uniform was available.

  The low number did not help him when Musial tried to grab a few swings during batting practice. In the custom of the times, Walker Cooper, the crusty old catcher, barked, “Get your ass out of there.”

  The Cardinals had earned the nickname “Gashouse Gang” for their bumptious pranks and hard-edged excellence in the thirties, and they still had a solid core of competitors in 1941. Cooper was not indulging in fraternity-boy rites when he ran the kid out of the cage; that was how things were in those days, on that team. But the manager made the lineup, and Billy Southworth needed Musial.

  Musial made his major-league debut on September 17, in the second game of a doubleheader. The Braves were en route to another seventh-place finish but, since the Cardinals had a shot at the pennant, Braves manager Casey Stengel played it straight with his best lineup. For his first view of major-league pitching, Musial got to track knuckleballs from Jim Tobin, a veteran who would win 105 games in his career and was sometimes called “Abba Dabba”—magician language. Never having seen a knuckler—released from the fingertips, not the knuckles—Musial popped up the first time.

  “This is strange,” he recalled thinking. “I never saw anything like that.”

  He was a fast learner. The second time up, he calibrated the Abba Dabba floater and rapped a double.

  Stengel watched the kid adjust to Tobin’s hocus-pocus. Sometimes Casey let himself look like a clown to make up for his bad teams, but he was serious about the game
. When the Braves played the Dodgers a few days later, Casey told the Brooklyn writers, “You fellas will win it, but those Cardinals got a young kid in left field who you guys are gonna write about for twenty years.”

  There is another version from Bob Broeg, who in 1941 was a rookie reporter far from home, in Boston. Stengel, who had a magnificent memory for details, spotted Broeg shortly after his first sighting of Musial.

  “Your club has got a guy with an unusual name,” Casey rasped at Broeg, acknowledging Broeg’s hometown. Stengel then described how Tobin had slipped the kid the knuckler. “Popped it up,” Stengel narrated. “So he threw that dead fish again, and he popped one”—a reference to Musial’s double. According to Broeg, Stengel paused for effect before adding, “He’s gonna be a great player.”

  Then there is a third version I have heard over the years, maybe from Casey himself. In that one, Casey told reporters, “They got another one,” which makes him sound a trifle jealous of the depth of the Cardinal system. Having been around Stengel during his days managing the Mets, I know the Old Man could be scintillatingly terse when he wanted to be.

  However Casey said it, he and Musial developed a lifelong affection. Whenever Stengel’s team came to town, he would take a party of “my writers” to Musial’s restaurant, where Musial would bustle over, calling him “Case,” and making sure the New Yorkers got the best cuts of beef, and laughing at every salty observation from the Old Man.

  In 1941, however, Musial could not have imagined ever owning a restaurant. He just wanted to last the two weeks of the season without embarrassing himself.

  In the St. Louis Globe-Democrat the next day, sports editor Martin J. Haley noted that the young hitter had two of the Cardinals’ six hits. Haley did not indulge in any rhetoric about “Who is this pheenom?” or “A star is born,” or even explain who Musial was. The kid just suddenly appeared and started swinging.